THE CUR.R.ENT CINEMA
HAVE MER.CY
"Damsels in Distress" and "We Have a Pope."
BY ANTHONY LANE
N ever a man in a hurry, Whit Still-
man has waited fourteen years since
"The Last Days of Disco" to deliver a
fresh film. After such a gestation, we ex-
pect something dense and hefty, like
"The Tree of Life," but "Damsels in Dis-
tress"-Stillman's fourth work-is pecu-
liarlyweightless and capriåous. Even the
distress of the title could, and probably
but there is a pinch of something rank
in their condescension. Their chief de-
light is not only to look down their
noses but to hold them whenever lesser
mortals, emitting what Violet calls an
"awful, acrid odor," walk by. She sounds
like Gulliver, at the end of his travels,
plugging his nostrils at the dinner table.
But the cause of her revulsion is merely
College try: Carrie MacLemore, Greta Gerwig, and Megalyn Echikunwoke.
should, be taken as a straight-faced joke.
We find ourselves in "a dream-bright
America," as N abokov would say, in the
present day, at Seven Oaks College. A
bouquet of female students is bunched
together: Violet (Greta Gerwig), Heather
(Carrie MacLemore), Rose (Megalyn
Echikunwoke), and a newcomer by the
name of Lily (Analeigh Tipton). Would
the others have accepted her if she had
been called Dagmar, or Charlene?
These young ladies-as they would
certainly, though not quite convinc-
ingly, style themselves-are fragrant
enough, and they dress as if Eisen-
hower were still in the White House,
84 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 9,2012
the student body at Seven Oaks, and, in
particular, the frat boys, whom she and
her friends wish to rescue and redeem.
Sample males include Frank (Ryan
Metcalf), whom she deigns to date, but
who betrays her for the sake of another;
Xavier (Hugo Becker), who is dastardly
and French; and Thor (Billy Magnus-
sen), a chunky lad so monochromatic
of brain that he doesn't yet know the
names of primary colors and goes into
paroxysms at the sight of a rainbow.
You may well react to Stillman's gang
of floral belles as they respond to their
coevals, yet "Damsels in Distress" casts
an unaccountable spell-a cool, thin-
blooded charm. It springs from the prin-
ciple that characters' feelings exist not so
much to be indulged as to be guyed and
sported with, or swapped like clothes and
shoes. The more intense the feeling, the
more that principle obtains. Violet holds
regular court, for instance, at a Suicide
Prevention Center, where her tip for
avoiding self-slaughter is to take up tap
dancing-in her estimation, "a highly
effective therapy." And when, jilted and
upset, she briefly leaves the campus for
the world beyond, she finds salvation in
a bar of soap, inhaling it deeply in a motel
bathroom and then, in a diner, offering a
sniff of its healing powers to a pair of
construction workers.
For Stillman, in fact, there is no world
beyond; nothing about "Damsels in Dis-
tress" can escape the clawing reach of
artifice. He has always shown a fondness
for the eloquently arch, and when Violet,
at the close of an argument, declares,
"Thank you for your chastisement," we
could be back in the verbal skirmishes of
"Metropolitan" (1990) or "Barcelona"
(1994). So what's new? Well, Stillman's
time out has coincided with the ascent of
Wes Anderson, and with the idea of the
finely wrought conceit that spreads and
curls beyond dialogue, into every nook of
a movie. Consciously or otherwise, Still-
man has followed suit, and thus it is that,
at a party, his camera gazes not directly at
the dancers but away from them, travel-
ling beside the dance floor and catching
them in a series of mirrors. Hence, too,
the hilarious sunshine that blazes through
our heroines' rim-lit hair and the fuzz of
their cashmere; we could be watching a
shampoo commercial from 1974, and
the director knows it. Beauty is not truth,
nor truth beauty; both are cradled in quo-
tation marks.
This distancing device reaches its apo-
gee in the song-and-dance numbers that
make up the film's finale. "Things are
looking up," the characters chant, as they
skip ann in ann down paths and around
a fountain. Even Thor, presumably
baffled by the concept of left and right,
gets his feet moving. What you hear, in
this scene, is a multitude of echoes. The
song is by the Gershwins, and Fred
Astaire sang it to Joan Fontaine, in a
comparably sylvan setting, in George Ste-
vens's "A Damsel in Distress" (1937).
That, in turn, was based on a novel by
P. G. Wodehouse, who helped with the 15